Anki Cozmo

~ the obituary ~

i build computer vision for a living now, on drones, and cozmo was a toy that did a tiny domestic version of the same thing. it was a robot about the size of your fist, made by a san francisco startup called anki. it drove around on little treads and pointed a camera at your face so it could recognize you and act like it had feelings about it. i never owned one. i watched it the way you watch a clever demo in your own field, half charmed and half checking the seams.

the personality was the point. anki paid animators who had worked at pixar and dreamworks to make cozmo emote, so it would perk up when it saw you and sulk when it lost a game. under that was real engineering, on-device vision running on a phone-class chip and a lot of ai research the founders had carried over from carnegie mellon. it was a genuinely hard thing sold as a cute thing, which is a respectable trick.

and it sold. anki claimed six and a half million devices across cozmo and its earlier toy cars, with more than a million robots moving in a single stretch of 2018. revenue was near a hundred million dollars. none of that was enough. consumer robots are expensive to build, and cozmo launched around a hundred and eighty dollars, which is a lot to ask for a toy that mostly sits on a desk and reacts.

the end came fast. a funding round the company was counting on collapsed at the last minute in april 2019, and acquisition talks with bigger companies did not close either. anki laid off more than two hundred people and shut down almost immediately. from where i sit, doing the industrial version of what cozmo did for fun, the lesson is plain enough. the vision part can work beautifully and the business can still starve.

~ the case file ~

~ the slide ~

the hard number under cozmo was the price of the intelligence. every unit carried real sensors and leaned on cloud servers to keep learning and stay current. that is an ongoing cost that does not go away after the sale, and a toy company earns money once, at the register. selling a robot that keeps phoning home is closer to running a service than shipping a product, and anki was priced like a product.

~ what it became ~

when anki folded, cozmo and its sibling vector were left as hardware with a dead brain, robots that needed servers nobody was running anymore. a different company later bought the remains and switched some of it back on, so a version of cozmo has an afterlife. but the anki that made it, the startup with the animators and the carnegie mellon research, does not exist. what shut down in april 2019 stayed shut.

@}-->--

              )
             (_)
            .-'-.
            |   |
            |   |
            |   |
            |   |
          __|   |__   .-.
       .-'  |   |  `-:   :
      :     `---'     :-'
       `-._       _.-'
           '""""""

« previous  ·  random  ·  next »